5 Ways To Get High Quality Backlinks: Avoid Getting Your Website Penalized or Banned By Google

You just finished designing, developing and writing the content for your website. In addition to this, you were proactive each step of the way and made sure that all your on-page SEO ducks were in a row (properly inserting keywords in your title tags, h1 tags, content, alt tags; not excessively using javascript and html; using static and seo-friendly url slugs, followed keyword density best practices etc).

Now, the most difficult step to making sure your website ranks well and is seen by search engine users is linkbuilding. Not only is linkbuilding time-consuming but Google weighs the value of each backlinks differently so you never really know how much a particular backlink will benefit your website. In most cases, though, getting an in-text backlink from a popular and respected website (in the eyes of Google) will help you more than a backlink acquired from an unpopular, unread and un-followed website.

The challenge of finding a juicy (high PageRank) has led many SEOs to do some pretty risky things like building low-quality, spammy backlinks in bad neighborhoods or even purchasing backlinks from link brokers. These acts are looked down upon by Google and run you the risk of getting your site penalized or banned from their search results pages.

If you’re in a situation where you feel that you are running out of options to building links and may be contemplating risky linkbuilding methods, give a crack at some of the tips I mention below–they’ll surely help get the wheels spinning:

1. I Scratched Your Back, Can You Please Scratch Mine? – Yes…I reworded the popular phrase a bit because “Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours” sounds so self-serving.

   If you’ve done some charity work with an organization recently, ask them if you can get a backlink. Or, if you helped a friend with a rather popular website, see if he/she can return the favor by getting you a contextual backlink from their blog section or (if you’re really close friends) a high PR/PA website.

2. Create a Simple Calculator that helps people “Determine when the best time to plant sunflowers and tomato plants are,” or even “How many calories are burned on the El Capitan Trail in Yosemite at Point X, Y and Z.” Make sure to add the content, title tags and H1 tags that are needed from an SEO stand point so that your page ranks for the keyword term in the search engines.
3. Take the time to write great content and submit it to popular websites in order to get an anchor text specific backlink to your website in the author bio box. Often, webmasters responsible for big websites are driven by the need to have great content and will gladly post your content so long as it’s relevant and of value to their readers.
4. You’re a business person with business contacts aren’t you? If you own your own website, you surely have contacts…so reach out to them.
5. Sign up for HARO (http://helpareporter.com/) and see what news sources are looking for as far as experts in your industry. Often times, reports have a quota to meet in terms of articles to be written a week and can’t put the time in to find out information on their own. This is your opportunity.

You may have not considered some of these linkbuilding tactics before. Perhaps you didn’t want to set the time that is required or maybe you didn’t know that you could build links this way. Either way, be prepared to roll up your sleeves and put in some hard work because these tactics aren’t the quickest way to build links–they are the least risky way to build them. They will, however, pay out in the long run. And besides, getting penalized by Google (a drop of 30 positions in most cases) or being banned altogether makes your website pretty much as good as useless.